Source: School of Geography and Planning
Written by: School of Geography and Planning
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

On October 1, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) announced the winners of the TWAS Prizes for 2013 at its 24th General Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina (twas.ictp.it/news-in-home-page/news/twas-announces-2013-prize-winners). Professor Li Xia at the School of Geography and Planning of Sun Yat-sen University is the winner of the 2013 TWAS Prize in Earth Sciences.

The TWAS Prize in Earth Sciences has been awarded to a scholar each year. Professor Li Xia is the third Chinese scholar to win the prize and the first scholar in the field of geographical information science to receive this honor. He has won this prize for his distinguished contribution to the development of cellular automata and agent-based models for land-use simulation and planning for sustainable land development in China. He will lecture about his research at TWAS's 25th General Meeting in 2014.

Professor Li Xia is a well-known expert in cellular automata and agent-based models for land-use simulation and planning and one of the most published authors in this field. Two of his papers published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS) were tied for first place and fifth place respectively in the most-cited papers of IJGIS in 1986-2013. His paper "Modelling sustainable urban development by the integration of constrained cellular automata and GIS”, published in IJGIS in 2000, was listed as one of the journal’s classic papers in 1987-2011.